We have left Vietnam, we’re now in Cambodia. Vietnam was officially our 2nd country but we never really counted Hong Kong. It was always only a stop-over. Vietnam was always #1. For an entire year people asked us where we were starting our journey and, although I was never ever able to actually picture myself there, I’d respond without hesitation. My response always conjured feelings that were at first hidden, not so hidden toward the end: disbelief, amazement, excitement, fear. I cried the night before we left because I was so scared. Now, after all that time and all those conversations we had with countless people about our trip that always began with Vietnam, it is behind us, a part of our trip that is over, we’ve seen it and smelled it and lived it.

It was overwhelming and insane on our first day and it was insane on our last day but not so overwhelming. I kind of fell in love with it and I’m really not sure why or specifically what I loved. I’ve really tried to put a finger on it and I really can’t say. The Vietnamese people always seemed weary of us at the start but would instantly beam a big smile back at us when we smiled at them. That’s fair enough since subtle cultural differences always had me feeling a little weary of them at the start as well. The greatest gifts came when we found ourselves in conversation with locals, children, shopowners. That’s where the beauty lied. I loved the choas of the cities, I loved the huge feeling of accomplishment I felt when I realized I was getting used to things, adjusting to the noise, the driving, the street crossing, the street cafes and food carts, and even squat toilets. Things became normal, we knew what to expect when we walked out of our guesthouse everyday and we felt like we were starting to blend with the energy of the city..
Of course, since this is sadly the only diary I’m keeping so far, I must confess for my own recolection some of my hard days:

1. I threw up on a long-distance bus. 2. When we were touring the Cu-Chi Tunnels I got a headache so bad that I started to cry and tried to hide behind David so that that other tourists wouldn’t see my crying. 3. I had more than one emergency bathroom trip where squat toilets were all there was, one time it was with a long line of Korean women noisily and impatiently waiting behind me. By some miracle, the countless times I had no toilet paper never coincided with the bathroom emergencies.

To be in Vietnam is to grow to love it but it’s also to grow immune and blind to many things. It was a constant battle to not impose my own value system on the Vietnamese culture, which I suppose is what traveling is all about. I had to evaluate and re-evaluate myself, my travel goals, my desire to know these countries we’re in instead of skimming only the easy parts beautified for westerners, with empathetic instead of judgemental eyes, every time I saw: 1. Every tourist and most Vietnamese who can afford it drink their water from plastic disposible bottles though there is barely a public trash can anywhere in the country, much less a recycle program. 2. We never saw a dog who didn’t look painfully neglected, a cow who wasn’t emaciated and tied up by a very short chain in someone’s very small front yard. 3. Children were out all hours of the night selling chewing gum, books, cigarettes, often times being dropped in front of tourist restaurants by their parents to try and make a sale. This is probably the most painful moral dilemna those of us with disposable income encounter in this part of the world. Parents would rather have their kids out on the street selling junk to tourists than have them in school. So if you buy from them, you’re encouraging this system and chances are the kids never get to benefit from any of the money. So, guidebooks say you shouldn’t buy from them but, on the other hand, they are lovely, beautiful if filthy children, with shoes woefully too big or too small and ripped clothing, who are only doing what their parents have told them to do. It’s a quandry every single day as we have no idea where these kids slept the night before or what they’re going home to that night.

But clearly, the most surreal thing I can say about our time in Vietnam was the sheer fact that we were standing where so much incredible violence had taken place. That we were tourists in a land that has seen so much tragedy – just to be tourists there is amazing.. It was pretty mind blowing just to be on the ground, looking around, with the ghosts of families torn apart, mothers, babies, young men and women and soldiers from around the world all around us. Just 20 short years ago, the Vietnamese were under a stringent rashining system that had families standing in line for hours for nothing more than a handful of moldy rice while I was driving around in my brand-new car, going to high school dances and spending my summers on the beach. We felt honored to be seeing this country in the dawn of their openess to tourism, we’re not the first wave for sure but we did feel like we were seeing something fresh and in its beginning stages.
As a close I’d like to share with you one of the last truly sweet things that happened to us before we left. Across the street from our hotel in Saigon was a 24 hour restaurant-bar catering to backpackers. This place fed us breakfast at 7am and turned neon crazy and thumped with bass until the wee hours. We stopped there a few times for coffee and always had the same waiter who remembered us after our first visit because of my voice (everyone knows by now that I’ve been teased my entire life because of my voice, right? And it happens here even in a tonal-language asian country – still they recognize something odd – geesh, there is no escape). So, we became friendly enough with him for us to gamble trying to ask for a full size mug of coffee instead of the 3 oz Vietnamese coffee we’d enjoyed for a month but it just never lasted long enough. We pointed to some other patrons who had big mugs and said to him, “coffee, big mug”. He smiled, said “yes, coffee big mug” and we thought we were on our way to our first whole mug of coffee since leaving home. Alas, over he came with 2 big mugs but with the traditional Vietnamese mini perculator on top which was in the proces of making for us………3 oz of coffee (don’t get me wrong, Vietnamese coffee is delicious -even coming from the coffee capitol of the US I can say that VN coffee is rich and smooth and probably better than, dare I say, what we get at home – the quantity, though, just isn’t enough) . Over the course of the next 15 minutes and I think 4 back and forth trips to the kitchen for our sweet little waiter, we finally were able to rudimentarally communicate and in the end enjoyed a full mug of coffee. Bearing the fruit of our labor, we invited our friend to sit down with us and we modeled for him how in America we lean back in the chair, relaxed, holding the mug, turning the pages of our imaginary morning paper and he began miming this action with us, everyone laughing and 2 out of 3 of us at the table feeling a little comfort of home.

We thank Vietnam for giving us a beautiful start to our journey.

1) A quick visit to a straw hut on the banks of the Mekong where a family makes the most wonderful coconut candy by hand. They are very generous with their free samples and free green tea – so much so that we were all stuffed on free candy and didn’t want to buy any.

2) Sunset on the Mekong river. The small straw houses on the banks of the river glow with life when the sun starts to set. Everyone wakes up from the heat of the day and gets busy with their chores.

3) Waving. I hate waving. I hate it when people who never normally wave get on a boat in Seattle or on the Thames and decide its time to wave to all and sundry. It makes me cringe. However, I now love waving. When rural Vietnamese and Cambodian families see a boat or bus of tourists they run out, jump up and down, wave, smile and shout ‘HELLO’ as loud as they can. This, my friends, is basic human contact. It says everything that is right about us as a species whereas getting on a boat in our western countries and deciding only now is the time to wave says more about what is wrong with our daily contact with our fellow global citizens than is right.
4) Border crossings in no-mans-land are interesting. A visa on entry for Cambodia is $20. If you would like the most pleasent crossing experience with barely a glance from the Cambodian offical that costs an extra $2. Think of it as a tip for very beautifully stamping your passport. We paid the $2 – this was no time for my usual opinions and sense of rightousness to get in the way.

5) Playing hi-five, lo-five and no-five with a little Vietnamese kid in the tiny town of Chau Doc. He didn’t know what to do, he just wanted to hold my hand; just wanted to see if I was real.
6) The Cambodian Pirates. When our boat finally was within fifteen feet of the dock in Cambodia there was a massive splash followed by twenty little hands clambering up the side of the boat, followed by ten little heads and then we were boarded. Kids ran everywhere on our little boat grabbing every bag they could find. Fortunatly we had our packs on our backs already but some weren’t so lucky and their bags went ashore to be held ransom for a dollar.

7) On the last bus trip, in the middle of absolutely nothing somewhere in Cambodia the bus broke down. It was getting dark and we lost all the coolent in the engine. I’m no expert but it probably was caused by stuffing twenty one tourists, eighteen heavy backpacks and one Cambodian driver who could speak no english into a circa 1980 twenty seat bus with no luggage space, running the air conditioning full blast and driving on roads that were paved for only 100 meters in every kilometer. The advantage of breaking down in the Mekong Delta is that 50 meters away in any direction is an almost unlimited source of coolent. So, the driver heads down to the river with a bucket and starts to load up the radiator with the finest Cambodian river water. He also throws a bunch of it over the engine for good measure. Two great things came of this event. Firstly the local kids ran up to, but a safe distance from the bus. They mugged for photos and shouted HELLO at us but when I went over to make contact they ran off giggling despite their mother telling them it was ok to meet us (although they stayed a safe distance away too). Secondly it cemented the friendship between the twenty one tourists who now were in, quite literally, the same boat, bus, then boat, bus, bus….. Shout out to Mark and Shirin who are from the UK and who we’re hanging out with us for the next few days.
I can say for sure that Marlon Brando is not at the end of the Mekong river in Vietnam but just like Martin Sheen I think we’ll remember this trip for a long time.

So, Hoi An famed for all things cultural lives in the shadow of its low culture while supposedly high couture main source of income. Tourists love a bargain and word of the bargains in Hoi An spread through the grapevine as far north as Sapa. In fact, on route to Sapa was where Archer (please refer to Sarah’s previous post) first informed us that, like a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, our fortune awaited us in Hoi An.

Hoi An removes dongs from wallets by tailoring custom clothing for virtually nothing. Sarah, always one to love definitely something for virtually nothing, was very excited at the prospect of a complete new, self-designed wardrobe with money left over for a pair of shoes and a 3,000 dong beer.

They make these clothes quick but the choice is endless so we started shopping on arrival. Literally every other shop in this town is a tailor and the manequins outnumber tourists which, if you remember correctly, outnumber mopeds. Competition is rampant and so are the people who jump out at you to make sure you visit their shop before anyone elses’. As with all Vietnamese retail outlets, they all sell exactly the same thing so the first one to snag you stands a great chance of getting your business. However, we had a plan. Archer had given us a recommendation and, although he was a dynamite expert at a coalmine in a remote region in Australia and, therefore, safe to assume his knowledge of clothing to be limited to the Aussie version of Carhart, it was still a starting place. Archer likes to do things on the cheap so we also decided to pay a visit to the most upmarket place we could find to compare. Not two minutes after congratulating ourselves on such a fine way to defeat the Vietnamese taut and hawker system, the whole thing went south.

Springing out at us from the cloth market (the lowest end of the tailoring spectrum in Hoi An) came CoCo Black Diamond. CoCo is gay – very gay – in fact so gay that Pride Parade in Seattle would need to lay on extra floats just to parade his gayness. Well, that’s how it seemed to us in a country where homongeny, not homosexuality, is encouraged. CoCo was very pleased to meet us and insisted we check out his very “funky” clothing. Sarah feel madly in love with him. I thought him a welcome break from the “what your name? where you from?” people. So we followed him back to his shop.

CoCo had nothing more to offer than anyone else but his vivaciousness was starting to win us over. He hugged us and ran around showing us samples. It was here that we learned you could have anything you want in this town. Just look through the Gucci, Chanel, Gautier catalogs and CoCo could whip it up for you in a day. After 95% promising CoCo we would return (he wanted 98% promise but I talked him down) we left with a spring in our step and a smile on our faces.

Long story short, if it’s not too late, we ended up betraying the 95% promised and went with Archer’s suggestion: a 4’10″ girl called Bi. Not surprisingly, Bi was also very happy to meet us, remembered Archer and promised us a huge discount for a friend. The process of designing your own clothes goes like this: pick a picture from a magazine, say you want this but not that, pick some fabric from the many bolts on display and negotiate your price. We did not negotiate. We had been promised a good discount and we got one. The price was so low, even if one item turned out fine it would still be cheaper than the US. Besides, what price can be put on so much fun?

For me it was fun. I ordered one suit and 5 shirts for less than $100. I returned the following day, tried on the suit, had the pants taken in and the sleeves lengthened and was happy as a clam.

Sarah, on the other hand, had a harder time of it. One dress, 2 shirts, 1 pair of pants and 3 days later she was still have adjustments made. Their system is not very accurate. After the initial measurement is done with a tape measure, all subsequent measurements are done with the amount of air between the index finger and the thumb and for Sarah’s clothes this was proving not at all accurate. After a lot of back and forth and take-ins and let-outs, everything worked out just fine. I now own 5 new shirts, of which all fit great until probably the first wash, and a suit that looks fine if I don’t stand next to its picture in the magazine I originally picked it from. Sarah (for just $40) owns a pair of pants she loves but will only wear traveling, a black shirt that’s “fine”, a white shirt she hates and a cute little halter dress. Of course, all that could be irrelevant because we had to entrust the clothes to the VN postal service to get them home so we may never see them again anyway.

Our room wasn’t ready when we arrived today so we waited in the usual
Vietnamese hotel lobby containing only the essentials: the reception desk and
the tour booking desk. The only chairs are the ones by the tour booking desk
making it impossible not to interact with the friendly face beaming at you from
the otherside. Mike was today’s face although when I earlier mentioned he
“works at” our hotel, I really should have said “works outside” our hotel.
Mike is hired by the travel company in the basement to bring in tourists using
any means he can. I suspect he wasn’t really meant to be in the lobby but it
was hot today and the lobby had A/C.

Mike isn’t really his name. But, as he told us with great affection (through
teeth that don’t see western dental practises very often) of his love for
Michael Jackson and that his friends tease him and call him “Mike” we decided we
should too. Mike was very happy with this arrangement and names were swapped.
It should be noted the later works of Mr. Jackson do not rate highly with Mike
but he loves Hotel California and has listened to it over 100 times.

Mike was born in a small town called Can Tho in the Mekong Delta south of
Saigon. His parents still live there, his Dad still works for the local
government but his Mom no longer works. He explained through broken but
enthusiastic english that he attended univeristy for two years but became bored
of having no money and thought the city would offer him better opportunities.
His mother was very upset with him but realized that it was important he “find
his own path”. So he found himself in Saigon.

He laments that he shouldn’t have left college so early and also that he took
french at school rather than english but he never once lapsed into either self
deprecation or blame of those around him. The Vietnamese are proud people but
proud in a good way not in the American way. Pride of your culture and
nationalism are two different beasts that the US would well be advised to
nurture one and tame the other. Speaking of which, Mike was very insistant that
we not feel bad in our upcoming tours of American/Vietnam war sites. He
repeatedly explained the Vietnamese love Americans and think only of today and
tomorrow and not of yesterday. We tried to explain it would be good for us to
feel bad but I think that’s a concept that niether translates culturally or
linguistically here.

Although Mike has worked for other travel companies, his new employer, TNK, is
the largest and most well known. This is his big chance and although only being
on the job for 22 days, feels he is making good progress. His career however is
limited unless he can earn his tourism certificate and for that he must return
to school. And there lies the conumdrum. In order to just survive Mike works
seven days a week, thirteen hours a day outside this hotel trying to get
tourists off the street into the office only to loose the credit to another
agent if he can’t immediatly seal the deal. Although he knows this is tough, he
also knows that he must work hard and prove to his boss that he can do the job
else he isn’t going anywhere. If he does well for the next few months his boss
may give him a couple of days off which, he says cheerfully, he’ll use to
sleep.

Mike loves to talk; it helps him with his english and he loves meeting people
however he is also proud of his job so its important that he explain with as
much detail as he can the tours his company offers. It seemed to be very
important for his career and his self esteem that he do the best job he can in
this regard, so repecting his wishes, we listened as hard as we could.

Later in the afternoon we decided what tours we should take and I walked across
the street to find Mike, tell him, walk him into his own office and have him
write out our ticket with his name as the agent. He was so happy not because of
commission (of which I doubt he’ll get any) but because he did a good job and got
business. When we talk of responsible tourism we talk of plastic bottles and
buying locally made goods but perhaps we should talk about conversations with
those who struggle to make a living from our cheap $5 day trips (lunch included,
drinks extra).

There are three things the small coastal town of Hoi An is famous for:

1) it’s speciality seafood

2) custom made clothing

3) it’s listing as a World Heritage town of cultural interest
Because of these assets it’s full of tourists, in fact more tourists than mopeds which is very strange for Vietnam. On the whole, the tourists aren’t interested in number 3, can’t eat anything but number 1 and go ga ga for number 2. In the interests of presenting you, the reader, with a balanced report, us, the travelers, will compile first hand reports on numbers 1 and 2 and quickly say the buildings covered by number 3 are neat but tales of CoCo Black Diamond and White Rose are much more interesting. So let us begin with number 1: food. Hoi An is on the coast and so famed for it’s seafood. White Rose is a like a pot-sticker with shrimp and fried onions, Fried Wontons are crackers with a shrimp based concoction on top and Cau Lau is a type of noodle soup made from well water from one and only one well in town. Notice the repetition of the words “fried” and “shrimp”. Most restaurants offer a set menu of all these things plus dishes like banana leaf steamed fish, crab soup and squid for about 60,000VND ($4) per person. It is, no doubt about it, a great deal – if, however, you are a westerner. The local people could never afford to eat at these restaurants and I’m not sure if they’d even want to. Comptetion in town is stiff, every restaurant sends people running to you with a menu and cries of “you eat here”. In order to save you the gastric distress that is bound to follow so much questionably prepared seafood, Sarah and I tested each dish for you. We are glad to report they are all very good the first time you eat them, rather good the second time, marginal the third and quite grim when you can’t find anything else on your last night in town.
All restaurants are family affairs and operate on lean profit margins. The menus are large but as we found out, only because of their proximity to the market. Whilst quaffing 3000 dong (20 cent) “fresh beer” Sarah had a hankering for the crab on the menu. When we asked to the size of the crab we were told they didn’t know until they went to the market to buy it. So, we ordered it and the girl grabbed her jacket and ran to the market to buy our lunch. Ten minutes later she was back and ten minutes after that, fresh crab steamed in lemongrass and garlic was on our table. In this town the restauranters like to help you eat. Mr Kim at the Cafe des Aimes likes to snatch your chopsticks from your hand and load your wontons with stuff in the right order and Mai at The Bale Well actually feeds you like a baby.
The Bale Well deserves a special mention. It’s off the tourist trail, hard to find and is right by the well whose water is the only one that can be used to make Cau Lau (which ironically doesn’t appear on the Bale Well’s menu). Mai doesn’t speak english except for the words “Vietnamese food, full tummy”. We were the only westerners there for a while, until two nervous looking Aussie girls showed up, but as soon as we appeared Mai leaped at us, and with much excited Vietnamese offered us a seat. Actually she offered us two each – the little plastic stools they sit on are too small for our long european legs so she stacked two on top of each other. No time for a menu (there wasn’t one anyway) or to ask the price because food started to arrive. Mai basically sells satay pork and chicken but it’s the process of assembling the rice paper roll and stacking the rice pancake that is the key to enjoying her fare. So insistant is she that it be done right, she does it for you complete with dipping it in the peanut sauce and stuffing it in your mouth. I can eat quick if I need to and I needed to because Mai was right there with bite number two. Sarah, as you probably know, eats really slow and this was proving culturally difficult for Mai to understand. No matter how hard she rammed the roll into Sarah’s mouth, it just wouldn’t go in. The previous occupant had not, nor had any intension of vacating the property. Fortunately Sarah handled it with all the grace required as peanut sauce flowed out her nostrils. More food came. More of the “same same” food came and still more. Mai stopped feeding us in order to feed the Aussie girls and Sarah could breath. Wonderful food but just like all the food in Hoi An, it was a little too much of a good thing. We left this local’s only joint paying about three times the local’s price but it was worth it just for Mai.
We next decided to take a Vietnamese cooking class, Just about every place here will sell you one and some are more elaborate than others. We chose three dishes from the menu we’d like to make and then headed to the market with Han our “chef”. Han is a lovely Vietnamese girl who I don’t believe has been to culinary school and works in a little family restaurant that has the odd rat or two. They all have a rat or two, every store, more rats than mopeds (which is now my standard unit of measure in Vietnam). What she lacks in formal education she made up for in market know-how. Asian markets are smelly, noisy, dirty and totally facinating. She showed us how to pick out the best veggies and we bought some noodles for our lunch. When we returned to the restaurant we proceeded to make steamed pork spring rolls, seafood hotpot and grilled shrimp in banana leaves. Please note the lack of the word “fried” in our choice of dishes.
I don’t believe Vietnamese cooking to be as sophisticated as some of it’s asian neighbors but it sure tastes good when you make it yourself and don’t fry anything. The simple ingredients are grown locally and very much organically – we haven’t seen any mechanized farming – the ox pulling the plough is as high tech as it gets. When they combine together with a little chilli and black pepper all is good with the world.
So that’s it for White Rose, read the next post to learn all about CoCo Black Diamond.

sometimes i have to take a deep breath in hanoi to keep from going insane.

it’s just that sometimes the incessant assault of 2 million honking scooters,

or that one street corner that i pass everyday where motorcyle repair shares the same slab of cement with the chopping of raw chicken

or constantly being chased up the street with, “you buy something from me? madame, hey, madame, banana? pineapple?”

i can feel a sensory breakdown coming on. but, for some reason, and I honestly can’t quite figure out why, i kind of love this crazy city. there’s this fantastic feeling of accomplishment from getting used to a city like this-when you learn how to cross the street, when the noise doesn’t sound so noisy anymore, when you start to sit at “side-walk cafes (the loosest translation I’ve heard yet) with locals. we have definitely decided that there’s no way on earth we could live here but we’re very glad to have been here, to have gotten used to it, and to head on out on the 11pm train tonight.More…

Sarah says:

we have just experienced something truly amazing and exactly one of the reasons we’re traveling in the first place. Since tourism in Vietnam is fairly new, there are only a few “must-see” tourist attractions and anyone who comes here as a tourist does all of them. The thing is, though, as we’re discovering, because Vietnam isn’t yet an easy or typical tourist destination, it doesn’t attract the typical tourist and it doesn’t provide the typical attactions – or so we’ve seen yet. The tourists we’re meeting are all *amazing* tourists, people who’ve been around the world 2 or 3 times, couples cycling through southern Vietnam with small children, 71 year old men with hip-replacements out climbing Vietnamese mountains. It’s been inspiring to meet the people we’ve met so far and we’ve loved every second.

So – Sapa. Sapa is a small mountain town in N. Vietnam renouned for its beauty of lush green rice terraces. Everyone goes. Including us. We booked a “typical” package which includes an over-night train north, a night in a hotel and a one-night homestay with a local village family. What we experienced was, so far, one of the highlights of all my travels. The whole thing was an adventure, starting with the over-night train when our cabin mates were 2 heavy drinking boys, one Aussie, one miserable Brit who’d just lost his wallet (oh yeah, that sucks) and they were both out to drown themselves in ice cold Tiger beer which came around on a cart every 40 minutes. Perfect timing. When in Rome, right? David and I joined in and it turned out to be a pretty fun train ride up – the Aussie turning out to be a big, lovable bear of a guy and we spent 6 hours taking the total piss out of the miserable Brit. Arriving at like 6am, we then took an hour long bus ride to the town of Sapa where we met our private guide, Huy, a 28 year old soft-spoken local man.

We had been warned that Sapa was cold – it’s the only place in all of Vietnam that ever sees snow and it was, as assured, very cold. We could have stood the 30F temps – we do have some layers with us in preparation for Nepal and we were wearing ALL of them – but we were not quite prepared for the buildings in this town to be completely without any heat. That’s right. It’s 30 outside, 30 inside. It was the strangest thing to see my breath while eating dinner in a gorgeous dining room. None of this matters – what I really want to impress upon aren’t the hotels or the town or anything like that. I really want to talk about the people. Sapa is a congregation of 5 tribes, people who migrated from China about 300-400 years ago. They are gorgeous people and they dress in beautiful, colorful wool skirts and head scarves. We spent the next 2 days getting to know these tribes and their lives. Everything we’ve seen of Vietnam so far has been one contradiction after another and we found them here as well. These tribes live off the land, farming all their food and livestock – they’ve been dependent on this land for hundreds of years and most of them still live they way they always have. However, everywhere you walk there is trash. We can’t figure out why they disprespect their land so much as to throw plastic bottles and candy wrappers in their water and along their terraces? Another point that was hard to resist: the children. Some of them go to school but some families have learned that their kids are very cute and can make the family money if they go out and sell “handicrafts” instead of going to school. The kids are BEAUTIFUL and their selling tactics cunning. They will follow you, sing to you, and they’ve learned excellent English from tourist. They ask you what’s your name and then tell you how pretty your name is. They’ll ask you how old you are and then say that you look so young. They ask if you have brothers or sisters and if you have babies. Every conversation ends with “you buy something from me?” and they’ll follow you and follow you for miles. It works.

On our 2nd day in Sapa we headed out with Huy for a 10km hike to a village where we’d stay for the night. In summer the scenery is amazing but in winter, it was foggy, cold and the trail was muddy. At the place where you leave the paved road and begin meandering through terraces, there was a hut selling water and about 50 children there all selling bamboo walking sticks. Small, beautiful children in tattered clothes, toeless sandles worn thin and often too big for them and dirty faces. and they all want to sell you a walking stick. So – we each bought one and we headed to the trail. The girls then pick a tourist to follow. It’s only the girls – boys in this society don’t work. They play. Girls make the family money. So you can see the girls spying out who they’ll follow and sure enough, we got our girl. Her name was Lang and she was stunning. She followed behind me asking the usual questions. I learned she was 10 and that her teacher was sick that day so she didn’t have to be in school. Along the way she made me things out of flowers – a crown for my head, a heart to put atop my walking stick. She was always there with a smile and would ask if we were OK. David took a picture of her and, normally the kids love to see their digital picture but not Lang. Huy said that she probably knew she was beautiful so she didn’t need to see the picture. When we stopped for lunch, the children weren’t allowed into where the tourists were eating. I watched Lang – she was out there waiting for us. The other children were surounding tourists like flies, “you buy something from me? you buy something from me?” Lang just waited for her sure sale. We ended up buying an embroidered pillow case from her that her mother made. I felt OK about buying it since she said she’ normally be in school. I wouldn’t want my money to be an incentive for this child to be kept from school. Along with selling, another reason the local children like the follow the trekking tourists is for the glorious chance to see a tourist fall in the incredible mud. The trails we were all on were steep and muddy like I’ve never seen before. The kids make it look soooo easy. We tourists all look like big, clumsy stumbling idiots and one falls every minute. They LOVE it!!! you can hear them cheering before you can see them. I’ll have you know, David and I did great. I never fell thanks to the strong hand of Huy. David had one minor fall on a particulary ridiculous area but he had the grace of a dancer I’m sure he’ll love me saying that.

Late afternoon we arrived at our homestay. In America I can only imagine that we would have been put up in a faux, replica of a village house but it would surely have heat and running water. Oh no – not here. It was the real deal and it was amazing. This family had 3 generations living in a spotless, contrete floor house with a squat-toilet outhouse, a buddhist alter in the living room and light by one light-bulb in one room of the house – the kitchen. The “kitchen” was actually one side of house partitioned off from the rest, a bit of the concrete floor cut out to serve as a sink, and an open fire pit in the middle of the room. From this, the husband and wife prepared for us and a German couple also staying here, the most delicious 8 course meal. beautiful, beautiful food. We think the grandfather, in his cute little baret, was maybe drunk on rice wine the whole night. His smile never left his face and he sat with us the whole night even though he didn’t speak a word of English. The girls selling their crafts followed us to the house and stood outside, patiently waiting for one of us to come out. Sometimes, they’d push the front door open and peek inside and we’d hear their faint, “you buy something from me?”. We started to joke that they were like the zombies from Shawn of thd Dead – they could smell us. The family all slept in one room off the kitchen and two lofts were set up upstairs for tourists. In the summer there are many tourists so they had 5 mattresses set up in each of two lofts. Fortunately for us and the Germans, that meant that each couple had access to 5 blankets David and I piled these 5 blankets on top of us but we don’t think they were normal blankets – they were more like iron drapes. we must have had about 3 tons on top of us but it was so warm and toasty!! by the middle of the night i didn’t even mind that i could see my breath if i peeked out from beneath them.

In the morning, we were presented with heaping plates of crepes and bananas, hot coffee – amazing. but just like the night before, the selling girls knew when we were awake. they were outside by 8am just waiting. we knew they were out there while we were eating breakfast – like we were being descended upon.

we had our guide express our thanks and took a group photo. they thanked us back and wished us safe and healthy travels and off we went. we spent the day hiking back to Sapa, we bid farewell to the cold town and to the girls relentlessly trying to sell us embroidered purses and charms and made our way back the night train. And as a stroke of luck, we were paired once again with the lovable Aussie and miserable Brit. But this time, we all just went straight to sleep.